People have forgotten to engage all their senses when selecting and eating food, meaning they are “disconnected” from it and their senses have become “lazy”. They are exploring ways of getting people to engage with food instead of just relying on sight. Some of them which we never noticed are:

Feel of the restaurant or the place you eat.

Feel of the glass ware

Feel of the plate ware

Weight and feel of the cutlery

And most important texture – can be accessed through touch. When food is placed in the mouth, the surface of the tongue and other sensitive skin reacts to the feel of the surface of the The sensation is also known as mouth-feel. Different sensations are felt as the food is chewed. The resistance to chewing also affects texture, e.g. chewiness, springiness. The viscosity is also a factor, e.g. runny, thick.The mouth also detects temperature, which plays an important stimulus, e.g. cold icecream, hot soup etc

Sense of touch has a great role in cooking as well. Here in this post I am illustrating the finger test to check the doneness of a sirloin steak. This is one of the easiest ways to practice.

Open the palm of your hand. Relax your hand and push on the fleshy area between the thumb and base of the palm. This is how you feel it when it’s raw.

Now feel with rest of the fingers. Trust me friends you won’t go wrong.

RAW

RARE

MEDIUM

MEDIUM WELL

WELL DONE

When is steak is nearly medium, it will start sweating

My chef experience in cruise ships brought my life’s 6 years closer to my grave. So hard is the job, though I learned a lot from there. I worked in all the international cuisines, worked with world renowned chefs, learned many languages, culture and more over seen the world.

Grill and roast was my favourite kitchen, where you need a great accuracy in cooking. We used to cook 250- 300 steaks in half an hour. End of the service I used to feel like coming out from the ships engine room, very very well gone!!

Spiced stir fried sirloin steak

Serves 3- 4

Preparation time – 15 minutes

Cooking time – 15 minutes

Ingredients

Sirloin steak – 400 grams

Small piece of ginger – chopped

Garlic cloves- chopped 3 nos

Cooking oil – 3 table spoon

Green chillies – chopped/ to taste

Curry leaves – 2 sprigs

Salt – to taste

Chopped coriander to garnish

Lemon juice – half a lemon

Pepper- red/ green/ yellow (sliced length wise)

Red onion sliced -1 nos

Fresh corn, water cress and rosemary for garnish

Spices to marinate

Cumin seeds- ½ teaspoon

Coriander seeds – ½ teaspoon

Dries red chillies – to taste

Ground turmeric ¼ teaspoon

Fennel seeds – 1 tea spoon

Garam masala powder – ¼ table spoon

Method:

Dry roast all the spices in a pan and grind together.

Marinate the steak with the spices and keep in the refrigerator for at least half an hour.

Grill the steak(to rare) and keep aside to rest for 3 to 5 minutes

Heat the remaining oil, rest of the ingredients, slice the seared steak in to strips an toss in the pan. Sprinkle the coriander leaves and serve immediately.

This is really helpful Sumith … I never get the length of cooking quite right – either too rare and has to go back in the pan or over cooked… I resort to slicing it to check… I’ll be trying out your way next time! I can’t imagine what it would be like to cook so many steaks in such a short space of time – I struggle doing 2 at once!! xx

That is fabulous advice for testing the doneness of a steak and I will watch for it starting to bleed as well as reminding myself how it should feel with my fingers! I cannot imagine cooking all those steaks for customers on the high seas – I imagine the kitchen was quite a frantic environment. I look forward to learning more about your time on cruise ships (and of course more of your delicious recipes and tips for the kitchen!)

Hi Osyth, thanks for taking your valuable time to read my blog. Cooking in a cruise line is a fun, I used to love it. After this busy kitchen we used to have a midnight buffet in the galley which is more interesting. I can’t paste the photos here other wise I would have shared it here.

This reminds me of a very happy time in my life when I made friends with the guys from the Indian Restaurant in our village. Saturday evenings, after closing several of us used to be invited to enjoy snacks and dancing in the flat above. Excellent fun and I used to stagger home about 1 a.m to sleep in with a doggy bag of foil containers to enjoy as brunch on Sunday!

Sumith besides the beautiful presentation you have gone one step forward and explained with the hands and also how one must really enjoy the decor of the restaurant and how to enjoy eating food. Amazing loved every bit of your post.